Initially, the Internet was a private network for government and academia that facilitated the exchange of text-based research across electronically-linked phone lines. More recently, the World Wide Web (“the Web”) has grown from the Internet to include a broader demographic reach by enabling the transmittal of multiple types of media in addition to plain text. However, despite the sophistication of contemporary browser technologies, the web remains an increasingly difficult environment in which to present complex information in a simple manner.
In the absence of compositional limitations, content developers try desperately to incorporate a wide variety of material types, including text and images, charts and research databases, stock tickers and transactional services, search engines and reference materials, plus personal files, linked files, and even linked applications. Additionally, this array of content and material types is being delivered and filtered through constantly changing technology and with ever evolving modes of presentation. While there are new and better delivery vehicles for this endless stream of content, what is missing is an underlaying visual structure for organizing and displaying this content.
Web-site authoring software assists content developers in creating the hyper-text mark-up language (“HTML”) necessary to enable such material to be “published” on the Web, but the resulting material is often poorly presented, and difficult to access, to navigate, and to understand. Some Web-site authoring tools, such as Fusion™, available from NetObjects of Redwood City, Calif., offer a variety of page templates for the insertion and subsequent display of information including text and graphics. These page templates are professionally designed single pages or forms containing generic content which is used as a placeholder for the content developers to replace with their own content or information. As such, the templates help the web page designer carve up a page or screen and create a framework in which information may be entered and displayed. Fusion™, for example, offers a variety of combined column and row based layout templates, as well as a set of templates designed for specific subject matter such as archives, billing forms, calendar of events, employee profiles, etc.
Although generic templates offer an attempted solution to this “web” of confusion, a more harmonious system of templates is needed to make this solution more reliable and more adaptable for different user needs. Accordingly, a system that offers a reliable and flexible toolkit for information architecture and display, and that provides a series of harmonious and coordinated templates to help developers edit, organize, and display their content to the users who need them most, is needed.
Further, such a system for information architecture and management has numerous potential applications, including but not limited to a series of layout templates for site-authoring software; an interface structure for user-driven information arrangement within an Internet or Intranet browser (e.g., user-driven personalization in My Netscape™ or My Yahoo™); or an interface structure for organizing files at the level of a computer operating system (e.g. windows sizeable and moveable by a user, but constrained to a given grid, or that open in fixed sizes, or that “snap to” fixed positions on a pre-determined grid structure). In each instance, the proposed invention offers a system for creating order in the display of information.
Because information is often presented on a computer screen, the manner of presentation on such a screen is an important aspect of the above objects. Computer screens generally are in the form of a rectangular module. Although at first impression, the shape of a computer screen may be considered uninteresting, user perception of the screen, and the information thereby displayed, is in fact influenced by a host of cultural associations. Consequently, interpretations of something as simple as a rectangle can vary, suggesting different social, symbolic, metaphorical, aesthetic and even spiritual qualities that affect our understanding of, and relationship to, a computer interface through a computer screen.